2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Graduate students, especially Ph.D. students, often work as teaching assistants (TAs) to support themselves financially. Recently, there has been a rise in the number of pre-doctoral or graduate student instructors, particularly in large public universities. These pre-doctoral instructors are Ph.D. students primarily focused on research but also take on independent teaching roles. However, instructors in STEM higher education, including faculty, do not often receive formal training for how to teach, posing a significant challenge for first-time graduate student instructors. Additionally, graduate student instructors do not often receive guidance, support, or mentoring for how to balance their independent teaching with dissertation research, classes, and personal. Therefore, in this paper, I share my three-year experience as an international student and pre-doctoral instructor, including the lessons I learned and how my teaching philosophy has evolved to support future graduate student instructors.
Through autoethnography and reflexivity, I conducted a thorough self-reflection on my three-year experience as a graduate student instructor. My journey began when I was appointed as an individual instructor for the undergraduate thermodynamics class in the second quarter of my first year as a Ph.D. student. Over the following two years, I continued working as an instructor, teaching mechanical engineering core and elective classes, including thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, introduction of material mechanics, and cryo-bioengineering. To date, I have taught 9 courses to about 700 students across three different institutions. Throughout this journey, I maintained a self-reflection journal and collected teaching evaluations and student feedback. Using autoethnography, I have critically analyzed my self-reflections and evaluations to assess my personal and professional growth as an instructor over the last three years. In this paper, I present the results of my critical self-reflection through a set of lessons learned and how my teaching philosophy has evolved, including improvements in teaching skills, time management, career development, and DEI in the classroom. Based on my personal experience, this paper aims to share a journal with peers who are interested in teaching while pursuing a Ph.D. degree and to bridge the teaching experience with career development.